Pick Your Poison

As usual, screens of varyingly inappropriate sizes around New York are competing for quality-hungry cinephiles this weekend—with Max Ophuls’s magnificent The Earrings of Madame De… still gliding across Film Forum’s downtown shoeboxes, cute little BAM’s Imamura retro hitting its peak on Saturday with his 1983 Palme d’Or winner The Ballad of Narayama, and Jafar Panahi’s Offside hitting U.S. theaters via the East Village dumping ground called the Quad (…but still, God bless you, Quad!), it’ll be tough to choose which masterpiece to see with which cramped viewing experience. With David Fincher’s video-velvety procedural Zodiac still showing in crisp, elegant digital projection at the Ziegfeld behemoth, it’ll be tough not to pitch a tent in that dying 53rd street movie palace all weekend. Best to enjoy them all, even if flanked on all sides by inappropriately giggling Film Forum middlebrowers, overly reverent Brooklynites, trenchcoated villagers who thought they bought a ticket for a movie called “Backside,”or out-of-(mid)towners looking for a little “spectacle” (and then getting pissed off that Fincher dares not provide it…for two hours and 45 minutes).